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PODCAST: 'Accelerationism' One-day symposium held at Goldsmiths College, University of London on 14 September 2010

Date Submitted:

2010-09-28

Announcement ID:

179240

In the early 1970s, post-68 French thinkers such as Deleuze and Guattari and Lyotard made the heretical suggestion that capital should not be resisted but accelerated. Deplored, repudiated then forgotten, this remarkable moment was returned to only in the UK during the 1990s, in the theory-fiction of Nick Land, Iain Hamilton Grant, Sadie Plant and the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit. Drawing upon Fernand Braudel, Manuel DeLanda, and cyber-theory, 90s accelerationism drew a distinction between markets (as bottom-up self-organising networks) and capital (an oligarchic and predatory system of control). Was accelerationism merely a new cybernetic mask for neoliberalism? Or does the call to “accelerate the process” mark out a political position that has never been properly developed, and which still has a potential to reinvigorate the left?

This one-day symposium will think through the implications of accelerationism in the light of the forthcoming publication of Nick Land’s Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007 and Benjamin Noys’s The Persistence of the Negative.

Speakers:

* Ray Brassier – co-editor with Robin Mackay of Nick Land’s Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007 (2010)
* Mark Fisher – author of k-punk blog and a founder member of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit
* Alex Andrews – a researcher at the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Nottingham.
* Benjamin Noys – author of The Persistence of the Negative (2010), blogs at No Useless Leniency
* Nick Srnicek – author of Speculative Heresy blog, PhD candidate at LSE, and is working with
* Alex Williams on a book critiquing folk politics Alex Williams – working on a book on accelerationism, blogs at Splintering Bone Ashes
This event has been recorded and is available as a series of podcasts at the following URL:

http://backdoorbroadcasting.net/2010/09/accelerationism/

Dr René Wolf
Department of History
Royal Holloway Univseristy of London
Egham, Surrey
TW20 0EX

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